William Lane Craig on being “the apologist who defends genocide”

I’m sure most of you are aware of this abomination by William Lane Craig, the article where he states his belief that if God tells you to slaughter women and children, then by gosh that makes it morally right. But Craig also has a follow-up piece that I never read (or looked closely at, I’m not sure) until it was tweeted by Richard Dawkins a couple days ago:

Many people seem to react emotionally, without engaging with the detail of your arguments and without providing their own moral foundations on which their outrage can stand…

Blah blah blah… okay, you get the point. What Craig’s fan said here isn’t really the point, I’m mainly quoting this because it’s amusing to see even a dedicated fan notice that Craig is becoming known as “the apologist who defends genocide,” and that Craig would feel the need to quote this observation in an article on his website. On to Craig himself:

I’ve seen those kinds of responses, too, Peter, and find them disappointing because they fail to grapple intellectually with the difficult questions raised by such stories. Emotional outbursts take the place of rational discussion, leaving us with no deeper understanding of the issues than before we began.

Wow. First the hypocrisy of this: Craig would never let an opponent get away with dismissing, say, his moral argument as an “emotional appeal.” He’d take that as proof that his opponent didn’t understand him and was, in fact, incompetent.

But more importantly, trying to dismiss objecting to genocide as “emotional” is obscene, as should be obvious from a second’s thought about more recent genocides. Just imagine someone complaining about “emotional” reactions to the Holocaust (or perhaps a bit more plausibly, the Armenian Genocide) by saying that “they fail to grapple intellectually with the difficult questions” it raises.

Back to Craig:

I find it ironic that atheists should often express such indignation at God’s commands, since on naturalism there’s no basis for thinking that objective moral values and duties exist at all and so no basis for regarding the Canaanite slaughter as wrong. As Doug Wilson has aptly said of the Canaanite slaughter from a naturalistic point of view, “The universe doesn’t care.” So at most the non-theist can be alleging that biblical theists have a sort of inconsistency in affirming both the goodness of God and the historicity of the conquest of Canaan. It’s an internal problem for biblical theists, which is hardly grounds for moral outrage on the part of non-theists. If there is an inconsistency on our part, then we’ll just have to give up the historicity of the narratives, taking them as either legends or else misinterpretations by Israel of God’s will. The existence of God and the soundness of the moral argument for His existence don’t even come into play.

Notice that there is no actual attempt at an argument here. Not that there usually is when Craig is making his moral “argument,” but here Craig doesn’t even bother insisting there are tons of atheists who agree with him. He just quotes Wilson, a fellow evangelical who’s also a slavery apologist.

The topic of God’s command to destroy the Canaanites was the subject of a very interesting exchange at the Evangelical Philosophical Society session last November at the Society of Biblical Literature Convention in Atlanta. Matt Flannagan defended the view put forward by Paul Copan in his Is God a Moral Monster?that such commands represent hyperbole typical of Ancient Near Eastern accounts of military conquests. Obviously, if Paul is right about this, then the whole problem just evaporates. But this answer doesn’t seem to me to do justice to the biblical text, which seems to say that if the Israeli soldiers were to encounter Canaanite women and children, they should kill them (cf. Samuel’s rebuke of Saul in I Sam. 15.10-16).

Old Testament scholar Richard Hess took a different line in his paper: he construes the commands literally but thinks that no women and children were actually killed. All the battles were with military outposts and soldiers, where women and children would not have been present. It is, in fact, a striking feature of these narratives that there is no record whatsoever that women or children were actually killed by anyone. Still, even if Hess is right, the ethical question remains of how God could command such things, even if the commands weren’t actually carried out. Whether anyone was actually killed is irrelevant to the ethical question, as the story of Abraham and Isaac illustrates.

Okay, it’s nice that Craig isn’t going to take refuge in dubious interpretation. I guess.

So even if Copan is right, I’m still willing to bite the bullet and tackle the tougher question of how an all-good, all-loving God could issue such horrendous commands. My argument in Question of the Week #16 is that God has the moral right to issue such commands and that He wronged no one in doing so. I want to challenge those who decry my answer to explain whom God wronged and why we should think so. As I explained, the most plausible candidate is, ironically, the soldiers themselves, but I think that morally sufficient reasons can be provided for giving them so gruesome a task.

There is one important aspect of my answer that I would change, however. I have come to appreciate as a result of a closer reading of the biblical text that God’s command to Israel was not primarily to exterminate the Canaanites but to drive them out of the land. It was the land that was (and remains today!) paramount in the minds of these Ancient Near Eastern peoples. The Canaanite tribal kingdoms which occupied the land were to be destroyed as nation states, not as individuals. The judgment of God upon these tribal groups, which had become so incredibly debauched by that time, is that they were being divested of their land. Canaan was being given over to Israel, whom God had now brought out of Egypt. If the Canaanite tribes, seeing the armies of Israel, had simply chosen to flee, no one would have been killed at all. There was no command to pursue and hunt down the Canaanite peoples.

It is therefore completely misleading to characterize God’s command to Israel as a command to commit genocide. Rather it was first and foremost a command to drive the tribes out of the land and to occupy it. Only those who remained behind were to be utterly exterminated. There may have been no non-combatants killed at all. That makes sense of why there is no record of the killing of women and children, such as I had vividly imagined. Such scenes may have never taken place, since it was the soldiers who remained to fight. It is also why there were plenty of Canaanite people around after the conquest of the land, as the biblical record attests.

No one had to die in this whole affair. Of course, that fact doesn’t affect the moral question concerning the command that God gave, as explained above. But I stand by my previous answer of how God could have commanded the killing of any Canaanites who attempted to remain behind in the land.

Oh wait, Craig is taking refute in dubious interpretation after all. Since few of Craig’s readers are unlikely to do the work of actually looking up the relevant passages themselves, it’s worth going over them in detail.

Before I do that, it’s worth emphasizing that the word “genocide” was never intended to mean “trying to kill every last member of an ethnic group, and only that.” Here’s how Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word genocide, defined the term in an early article on the subject:

New conceptions require new terms. By “genocide” we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group… Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.

Under that definition, there’s no question that the destruction of the Midianites described in Numbers 31 qualifies. Here’s the story: the Israelites go to war against the Midianites, kill all the Midianite men, and capture the Midianite women. Moses, however, is mad the fact that the women were allowed to live, and orders the Israelites to kill all the women and young boys, but to “save for yourselves” all the virgin girls.

The Bible doesn’t explicitly say the command to kill was carried out. Instead, it skips straight to listing all the “plunder” the Israelites got from their war against the Midianites, giving numbers for how many thousands of sheep, cattle, donkeys, and virgin girls the Israelites got from their war.

In a different, but still undeniably genocidal vein, in the Old Testament God seems to have a real grudge against the Amalekites specifically, out of all the Canaanite tribes. In Exodus 17:14, God memorably promises to “utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.” Deuteronomy 25:19 uses similar language, except that the Israelites are commanded do the blotting out on God’s behalf.

Now, it’s true that there are passages in the Bible that “merely” talk driving people out of their land. Yet even these can be kind of genocidy. Here, for example, is Deuteronomy 20:16-17:

As for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded.

When God here says “You shall annihilate the Hittites” (etc.), He doesn’t actually qualify that He only means the ones in the land He gave the Israelites, but you can argue that based on the previous sentence it should be read that way. However, there’s no actual mention of giving the Hittites etc. a chance to get out.

Compare that to the previous verses of Deuteronomy 20, where God says that when you make war against a far away city, you should give them a chance to be your slaves before you kill all the men and enslave the women and children (a passage I already noted here).

In any case, remember what I said about the definition of genocide earlier. It doesn’t have to mean killing every last member of a group. I suppose you could argue that on Lemkin’s definition, driving out the Hittites etc. wasn’t genocide because their “essential foundations of the life” could have survived being “driven out.”

But if you want to argue it wasn’t technically genocide, consider this slightly broader definition that’s been given for “ethnic cleansing”: “the planned deliberate removal from a specific territory, persons of a particular ethnic group, by force or intimidation, in order to render that area ethnically homogenous.”

Deuteronomy’s program is pretty clearly ethnic cleansing by that definition. And while “ethnic cleansing” was originally a euphemism used by those who committed it in Yugoslavia, it has since fallen off the euphemsim treadmill and–rightly–come to be seen as morally equivalent or at least near-equivalent to genocide.

In fact, I feel a bit dirty indulging Craig’s semantic hair-splitting as far as I have, given how closely it resembles the rhetoric of apologists for non-mytholigical atrocities, including the Armenian Genocide, which some (mainly the Turksih government) have tried to argue wasn’t technically genocide, even though it was one of the things Lemkin specifically had in mind when he coined the term “genocide.”